The present invention relates to the conveyance and organization of articles for shipping, in particular to a conveyor for conveying, adjusting, rotating and organizing bundles of corrugated boxes for shipment.
The trend in manufacturing has long been in the direction of increased automation to improve efficiency and reduce costs. While manufacturing processes have received significant attention in many industries, automation of procedures for transporting and organizing finished products from manufacturing to shipping have often lagged behind. Frequently, the procedures involve material handling problems which are unique and product-specific, and the solutions presented are limited. For example, apparatuses have been developed to convey, manipulate and organize manufactured articles, such as milk cartons, bricks and filled sacks, into groups for shipping, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,820,302 to Doran et al; U.S. Pat. No. 4,014,441 to Osborn et al; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,700,127 to Kurk et al. A common drawback of such methods is that the progress of the finished goods on a conveyor must be interrupted to manipulate or organize the products. Interference in the flow of finished products from a manufacturing line may, accordingly, result.
In the manufacture of corrugated boxes, knocked-down boxes issue from manufacturing lines in bundles. Bundles may include any number of boxes, typically 25, and may be stacked loose or retained by a band. Current box manufacturing machines produce any number of box sizes within the range of the machine, producing one box size at a time. While most phases of such plants have now been automated, the manipulation and organization of bundles conveyed from the manufacturing line to shipping remains largely non-automated and relatively labor intensive. That is, typically, newly manufactured box bundles are transferred to a conveyor from which they are stacked manually or mechanically on a pallet for shipping, with the bundles being organized by hand into a pattern which substantially covers the pallet. Bundles are desirably organized into a pattern for efficient shipping.
Problems are encountered with current manual methods of manipulating and organizing bundles for shipping. Interruption in the progress of bundles from the manufacturing line is inevitable when manipulating and stacking bundles by hand, and jamming of bundles results. Moreover, bundles of large sized boxes present additional handling problems due to their size and bulk. Some automation has been introduced whereby bundles are rotated 90 degrees by stopping the conveyor, picking up the bundle, turning it, and replacing it on the conveyor. Such methods have the drawback of interrupting the progress of products on the conveyor and can on occasion cause bundles to come apart. As a consequence, the rate of production by box manufacturing machines is effectively limited by the rate at which the bundles produced may be manipulated and organized in preparation for shipment.
Accordingly, new methods are needed to automate the conveyance, manipulation and organization of box bundles for shipment and avoid the interruption in production occasioned by current methods of manipulating and manually organizing box bundles for shipment.